Linux

I really enjoy alacritty, it provides you a terminal with nice defaults.

For a bit more base functionality, such as tabs or split panes, you could look into kitty or wezterm for example.

In the case of alacritty you'd need to look at other tools such as tmux or zellij for multi-terminal workspaces in one window.

I'm sort of in the same position I guess. I'm interested in other options, but so far Konsole has more than satisfied my needs. It does everything I need and is easy to customize.

Tillix with zellji is golden

TLDR: try them out, see what you like. It's a relatively easy switch-out, it's not like you're debating different web stacks.

I used zutty for awhile. It was fine and lightweight, but broke when I switched back from the nvidia drivers to nouveau (it's an older laptop that has no reason to milk every last bit of performance out of its gpu).

Now I'm using Alacritty. I like that I can configure it in a .yml file instead of needing to use my mouse, I like that it's written in Rust, I like that I got it to do transparency within minutes. I love the vi mode.

On my daily driver I use Terminator. I like the multiplexing/tabs/panes, the infinite scrollback when needed, and the logger plugin when needed. I might see if I can get it to do transparency tomorrow.

xterm has always treated me well too. Just a good, solid choice.

I guess my two biggest pieces of advice re: terminal emulators are

1. use tmux, it's extremely convenient once you get the hang of it. It's like any terminal-based text editor: hard to learn, but such a pleasure to use once you've got it down. Why waste time moving over to grab your mouse when you could just hit 2-3 keys?

2. configure the hell out of whatever you pick. It doesn't feel comfortable, like it's your command line—in the same way that it's your bed, or your chair, or your computer—until you've configured it. After you do, it just feels comfortable. Change the color scheme to all custom colors, change the font, change the shell, change the sounds, change the cursor blink rate, disable cursor, disable animations, disable text output, enable scrollback, enable logging, enable transparency, enable autopilot, adjust the retro encabulator, fasten your seatbelts, eat your veggies, stay in school.

3. use transparency. There's just something so pleasant about something more than a solid color background.

It all depends by what you need it for.
I remember the first years I approached Linux I wanted to try every bit of software and that made me waste a lot of time and energy because I hadn't already learned to ask myself that question.
If you just need a terminal to run updates and basic commands, stick with what your distro is shipped with. It will be better integrated and well tested and will save you a lot of time.
If you need something in specific instead, you'll be able to find the software with a feature set that will match all your needs.

I use both Konsole and Kitty and both are excellent.

As long as I have my aliases working and I can strip away unnecessary gui clutter, I'm fine with whatever.

Would be foot but monaspace font doesn't work that well, so kitty

I just never would recommend mixing Gnome's Terminal and Konsole. Gnome and KDE never seem to play nice with each other. Besides that, go wild.

Wherever possible I use the XFCE defaults, as I basically turn Budgie into XFCE. So I use the XFCE-Terminal, and it's probably the most comfortable TE I've tried.

I'll impart my wisdom of more than 25 years of using linux on you. You're welcome.

TL;DR: If you're using a desktop environment, just stick with what it ships. The shell running inside of any terminal emulator gives you much more leverage for improving your performance than any terminal emulator can. You want to use zsh.

Coining terminal emulators as GPU accelerated is misleading. Almost all GUI terminal emulators use GPU acceleration, simply because they are based on toolkits which rely on GPU acceleration (GTK, QT, ...). Things like alacritty are performance optimized. In my experience the use cases where this optimization is even noticeable are rather fringe. And the difference in performance comes at a price: standard compliance, feature completeness, bugs, usability/user friendliness. Don't get me wrong, I encourage you to try different terminal emulators, if only for the fun of tinkering with them. But, I predict that you'll always eventually come back to Konsole (as did I). Konsole is the most feature complete terminal emulator I've ever encountered. It is stable, easy to use, the performance is quite good, it has tabs, some tiling support, image support, wide character support, ...

At the end of the day the best fit for you depends on your desktop environment and workflow. I used to make extensive use of Yakuake; having a terminal one keypress away for some quick commands and instantly dropping back into whatever I was doing before was quite useful. With integrated terminals, that have the added benefit of context (working directory, PATH, ...), having become the norm in IDEs and editors, that use case has completely vanished for me. I get the allure of tiling terminals for people who use tiling window managers. But if you're already using a tiling WM, tiling support by the terminal emulator is kind of moot (imho). While I regularly have/need multiple terminals open side by side, a static tiling configuration is completely useless for me. How many terminals I need in what arrangement highly depends on what I'm doing. Having tabs in Konsole and multiple Konsole windows with the tiling and snapping by Kwin is much more useful than any tiling support I have seen in terminal emulators.

I've always loved Krunner, over the years it has become central to my workflow. It can do so much more than just launch applications. Important here and to me: it can navigate to open windows and individual tabs inside of windows (if supported by the app). Having one tool for all desktop navigation is much more useful to me than any individual solution (i.e. tiling within a terminal emulator).

Most terminal emulators would work fine for me. What makes a huge difference though, is what runs inside of a terminal emulator. I went from bash to fish (before it was cool) to bash to zsh. I've settled on zsh with fzf for history search and a ton of evolved custom configuration for a decade now. No terminal emulator switch can have even remotely the impact of a shell switch.

So, long story short, my advice to you, and everyone for that matter: spent more time on what's inside the terminal emulator. If you run KDE/Plasma, just stick with Konsole. Dip your toes into other terminal emulators for the fun of it, but do not expect any substantial/meaningful improvement to your personal performance because of it.

I hope you can take something useful from this wall of text.

On Cosmic you can tile multiple windows in tabs. Tabs are essential for me, I tried Alacritty (and it had quite some issues but I got it to work) and switched back to Konsole

I was a fan of Alacritty and used it for the last 3 years, but I was frustrated by the lack of features (no scroll bar, no native tabs) and the disrespectful way the developers handled feature requests.

A few weeks ago someone on this site recommended Wezterm, so I tried it out, and it's amazing. It's everything I was hoping Alacritty would be or could become.

Read this thread for more details, specifically the reply by wez: https://github.com/wez/wezterm/discussions/1769

Konsole and Kitty are objectively better than alacrity. So it's a question of which of those to use. Konsole if you use the Breeze application style, and Kitty if you don't. Konsole has the best keybinds and it actually has a scrollbar, but kitty doesn't require breeze.